I’m thinking tonight of something I heard a friend’s mom say a few years back when I was having dinner at their place. “The churches don’t teach these young people anything about the Bible anymore,” she said. “They don’t even teach the Ten Commandments.”

My friend, who is a practicing Christian, said, “Hey Mom, what are the Ten Commandments?” His mother managed two or three of them, but that was it. He said to her, “I’m not sure how you would know what the churches do or don’t teach kids, because you hardly ever go to church.” Oh, the old lady was mad!

… “I just get tired of hearing my mother blame pastors for everything. You think she ever taught me anything about the Bible growing up?”

The recent shooting deaths of five officers in Texas has brought home the innate danger of this profession, and the children and spouses of police officers are now overwhelmed with the fear their precious loved one will not come home, all because they all stand accused when one officer makes a bad judgement call, and shoots an innocent person.

The pain, sorrow, anger and outrage felt by so many black people following the death of innocent members of their community is understandable. Who among us wouldn’t want to lash out in anger at the perceived source of a racism that would target members of the black community. Who among us, if we be serious about our common bond as humans, can refrain from lashing out at injustice in a country that has battled racist roots yet to be uprooted? Yet we must be careful not to paint a whole profession of men and women with one brush stroke, and thus turn them all into racist killers. To do so would be no different than to paint all clergy as pedophiles, for the sins of a few.

At the heart of this problem is the fact that human beings working in the most difficult of professions, can make terrible, life changing errors of judgement, and in a moment of time, leave a grieving family without a beloved son, husband, father, all the while depriving another family (that of the police officer) of their loved one as well.

I reckon this is the composition of the Russian army:
– 50% ex-convicts with a blood curling pedigree in murderous activities
– 40% Cossacks who can survive months on grass and elk milk.
– 10% Siberian shamans have undergone initiation rites that would make Charles Bronson cry like a toddler.

They have all been promised unlimited vodka and carte blanche with Ukranian women in case of victory.

On the other hand this is the composition of NATO’s army
– 20% Girls fully equipped with empathy, sisterhood and togetherness
– 10% Chelsea Manning, Conchita Wurst and other assorted freaks
– 5% Disabled (EU equality quota requirement)
– 10% Belgians
– 55 % Radical Muslims who joined the army to collect intelligence and steal weapons.
They have all been promised rainbow coloured uniforms in their next Gay Pride march.

Yes, government classification rules have gone amok, so that Christmas greetings now count as classified (though Clinton also sent through genuinely classified information).

But this is precisely the point. In a world where everyone is a felon, it’s not the law that decides who gets prosecuted, but people. Prosecuting is a subjective choice. And those decisions will inevitably end up being political.

FBI Director James Comey argued that “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring charges against Clinton. But when that same Comey was U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, he brought a bunch of three-felonies-a-day prosecutions against Wall Street bankers. Well, Wall Street bankers are unpopular. “Taking on Wall Street” is good for a prosecutor’s career.

The same isn’t true for a career government official who indicts the presumptive presidential nominee of a major political party.

It’s almost as if the American governmental class has made a concerted effort to vindicate Donald Trump’s critique of American society, split between self-dealing cosmopolitan insiders and the great mass of outsiders.

What matters isn’t whether what Clinton did is legal or not (though it’s not). It’s that in a healthy political system, politicians are held accountable way before it gets to that.

Bring your gaze over to Britain. After the political slap in the face that was the Brexit referendum, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron resigned, even though he was under no constitutional or legal obligation to and, indeed, there was no coup against him in the offing. So did Nigel Farage, the leader of the U.K. Independence Party, who concluded that after he’d done his job of winning this referendum, he should step back. The entire country is aghast at the fact that the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn isn’tresigning despite being disavowed by his entire team.

Britain’s parliamentary politics combined with the aristocratic ethic of honor led to the cultural institutionalization of the single most important tradition for any political system to function properly: accountability.